On my Raspberry Pi and my much older AlphaServer have configured the system to use the serial port as the console, as this means I can use them ‘headless’ without having to plug-in a screen or keyboard (very useful if you are on the move and only have a laptop).

It can be a bit frustrating however if you have a terminal window that is more than 25 rows high by 80 columns wide to find that the extra space isn’t used. The good news is that you can tell linux how many rows and columns to use with ‘stty’.

For example of you have a console window that is 34 rows by 132 columns wide you can set this up with the following commands: